Power meter leveling may be used to correct for frequency-dependent transmission losses caused by cable and connector impairment between an object of measurement or electromagnetic illumination, referred to as device under test (DUT), and the measurement instrumentation or the signal source. Power meter leveling correction, for electrical spectrum analyzers or signal generators usually involves coupling swept frequency power, over the frequency range of interest at the opposite side of the cable/connector impairment and feeding back an error signal that is used to calibrate the received power, or the sourced power as a function of operational frequency. However, the correction is scalar, and thus phase dispersive and mismatch effects that can distort time waveforms are not corrected, e.g., for an electronic signal analyzer (ESA) and/or for an electrical signal generator.
An alternative conventional approach to power meter leveling is to measure the impairment with a swept-frequency vector network analyzer and to determine correction data. The correction data is stored, and subsequently used to provide correction of phase and/or amplitude distortion. However, because this approach is non-insitu, it does not account for the time-varying nature of distortions caused by cable/connector impairment, nor does it provide a means to compensate time-varying distortions within the confines of the measurement instrumentation which may interact with the impairments between the measurement instrument and the DUT. Also, separate measurement equipment must be provided for the measurement, which is time consuming and inconvenient.